2 Aug
2024
2 Aug
'24
4:58 p.m.
Greg, this needs to move to COFF, so I'm BCCing TUHS in my reply. (My error
in the original message was that I should have BCC'd everyone but COFF, so
replies were directed there. Mei culpa).
However, since I have seen different people on all these lists bemoan the
loss of the LCM+L, I hope that by the broader announcement, a number of you
will consider the $36/yr membership to help Stephen and his team to be able
to keep these systems running and the at least the "labs" port of the old
LCM+L mission alive.
On Thu, Aug 1, 2024 at 9:56 PM Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hello!
Pardon me for asking Clem, but would you mind naming the survivors?
The details are still coming out from Stephen and friends -- I would
recommend listening to his presentation and then maybe joining the List
Server at SDF by sending a (plain text) email to majordomo(a)sdf.org with
the subject and body containing the line: subscribe museum-l
I have an idea what these Toads are, and of course what Multics happened to
be, but that's it.
LCM+L owned a real Honeywell 6180 front panel. The folks in their lab
interfaced it to a microcontroller (I think it was an RP3 or 4, but it
could be something like a BeagleBone, I never knew). It was running
Multics Release 12.8 on a SimH-derived Honeywell 6180 [I'm not sure if
those changes ever made it back to OpenSIMH - I have not personally tried
it myself]. This system seems to have been moved to SDF's new site.
Also, a number of the MIT Multics tapes had been donated to the LCM+L.
These have survived, and the SDF has them. I'll not repeat Stephen's
report here, but he describes what they have and are doing.
Miss Piggy is the PDP 11/70 that Microsoft purchased and used for their SW
original development. It has been running a flavor of Unix Seventh Edition
- I do not know what type of updates were added, but I expect the DEC v7m
and the V7 addendum to be there. You can log in and try it yourself by ssh
menu(a)sdf.org" and picking Miss Piggy in the UNIX submenu. Miss Piggy
used to live and be on display at the LCM+L, but Stephen and the SDF were
involved in its admin/operation. Stephen says in his presentation that they
are trying to get Miss Piggy back up and running [my >>guess<< is that the
"Miss Piggy" instance on the SDF menu is currently running on an OpenSIMH
instance while the real hardware is being set up at the new location].
In the early 1980s, as DEC started to de-commit to the 36-bit line after
they introduced the 32-bit Vax systems, a number of PDP-10 clones appeared
on the market. For instance, the System Concepts SC-40 was what
Comp-U-Serve primarily switched to. Similarly, many ex-Stanford AI types
forked to create the Toad Systems XXL, a KL10 clone. SDF and LCM+L owned
several of these two styles of systems and were on display and available
for login. Since Twenex.org is live (and has been) and Stephen shows a
picture of the SC40, again, I am (again) >>guessing<< that these have all
been moved to the new location for SDF.
Stephen mentioned in his presentation that they have the LCM-L's Vax7000
but do not yet have the 3-phase power in their computer room. He suggested
that it is one of the most popular machines in the SDF menu, and they
intend to make it live shortly.
It is unclear what became of some of the other items. It was pointed out
that running a CDC6500 is extremely expensive to operate from a power
standpoint, so they offer an NOS login using the DTCyber simulator. He
never mentioned what became of the former Purdue machine that the LCM owned
and had restored.
I am interested in knowing what happened to the two PDP-7s. I know that at
least one was privately owned, but was being restored and displayed at the
LCM+L. It was one of these systems that Unix V0 was resurrected and ran
for the UNIX 50th Anniversary Party that the LCM+L hosted. The LCM+L had
some interesting peripherals. For instance, the console for Miss Piggy was
a somewhat rare ASR37 [which is Upper/Lower case and the "native" terminal
for Research Unix]. I hope they have it also. The LCM+L had a number of
different types of tape transports for recovering old data. Stephen
mentioned that they have some of these but did not elaborate.
Clem